Hair Headscarf
Handwoven shawl made from the artist’s and her mother’s hair
The Hair Headscarf reconfigures the politics of visibility and control through an intimate material—human hair. In Iran, where women are legally required to cover their hair in public regardless of faith or origin, the work transforms what must be hidden into the very substance of the covering itself. By weaving hair into a headscarf, the piece confronts and subverts the state’s authority over the female body, turning an imposed symbol of modesty into one of resistance and self-determination.
Employing kilim and crochet—techniques traditionally practiced by women and passed down through generations in the artist’s family—the work honors craft as a site of memory and agency. The pattern draws inspiration from Persian arabesque motifs, particularly those found in the borders of Ardabil carpets, merging heritage and dissent into a tactile dialogue between ornament, identity, and control.
Flying Carpet
Hair and cotton weaving
Flying Carpet is woven from the natural hair of Iranian women, intertwined with cotton warp and weft. Through this act of weaving, a symbol of restriction is transformed into one of transcendence. Hair_once hidden, regulated, or cut as a marker of virtue_becomes the very thread that enables flight.
In Persian mythology, the flying carpet embodies freedom, imagination, and movement beyond the limits of the body and the ground. Reimagined through a profoundly gendered material, this work turns women’s hair into a site of both memory and defiance. Each strand carries traces of lived experience, silent gestures of endurance, and the desire to move beyond imposed boundaries.
By using hair as both material and metaphor, Flying Carpet becomes a collective portrait of resilience. Its tactile delicacy conceals strength; the process of weaving echoes generations of women’s unseen labor_intimate, domestic, and foundational to culture. As it takes flight, the carpet carries with it not only the weight of control but also the quiet force of liberation.
Unaligned
Hair and emergency blanket
This work brings together two charged materials: a kilim woven from women’s natural hair and a crocheted emergency blanket. The intimate, historically regulated presence of hair is interlaced with the metallic surface of an emergency blanket—a material associated with displacement, crisis, and protection. Through weaving and crochet, techniques rooted in domestic labor and intergenerational knowledge, these elements merge into a single textile that holds the tension between vulnerability and resilience, personal memory and collective experience.
The piece draws on the emblem of the Trans-Iranian Railway, one of the few national logos that has remained unchanged across political eras. Its design emphasizes the railway’s northwest direction—a choice historically disputed from the Qajar to the Pahlavi period. Prioritizing the northwest route signaled military strategy, whereas an east–west line would have primarily served the nation’s commercial development. This unresolved tension between competing orientations reflects broader questions about the country’s identity and future, shaping the collective fate of the Persian people.
The title also echoes a well-known post-revolutionary slogan advocating independence from both East and West. Within this context, the woven hair and emergency blanket become metaphors for the geopolitical and cultural “in-between”: a space where bodies, histories, and decisions are shaped by forces larger than the individual, yet felt intimately in daily life. The work positions the textile as a site of both fragility and resistance, carrying the weight of inherited narratives while imagining new directions forward.